This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Friday, July 15, 2011

A report from Yahoo shows a father and son watching the first Space Shuttle launch - and the last launch, thirty years later:

Thirty years ago, the first space shuttle launched into the stratosphere. Chris Bray and his father Kenneth watched -- and took a picture. Then last Friday, the shuttle Atlantis took its final trip. Again, the Bray men were there. And again, the two snapped a photo to capture the moment.

The first shot shows 13-year-old Chris with then 39-year-old dad looking through binoculars at the space shuttle Columbia's first launch on April 12, 1981, from the Kennedy Space Center.

The second snap comes three decades later and recreates the same moment at the last shuttle voyage. The young son is now an adult. His father is now gray-haired.

Chris Bray wrote on his Flickr page of the side-by-side images: "The picture we waited 30 years to complete."

This side-by-side view captures the Generation X experience of growing up through the Technological Revolution in a nutshell. Previous generations of course remember society before the Tech and Info booms hit full force. But these explosive developments were not bound up with their collective childhood, adolescence and identity. As Gen X grew, so did the technological world, and only that generation exactly straddles the time that came before, and the period that followed.

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.